Fake Empire
by oftimeandspace
Summary: In 1969, Mitchell was a willing participant in the summer of love, though his was perhaps a mirror version of it. Mitchell/Josie


He finds out she's a dancer three days after they make love for the first time; he asks her to talk about something, anything that does not have the taste of death and blood on it, and she looks at his shaking hands with thoughtful eyes and starts going on about her job while she makes them fresh cups of cheap tea.

She trained in ballet, she tells him, leaning over to press a chipped blue mug into his hands and then sit beside him on her bed; was consumed by it until she realized nothing would ever come of it and she discovered modern dance.

"It's maudlin," she says, grinning at him crookedly, the faint scent of lavender clinging to his skin when she leans into his side and tilts her head up to stare at the cracked plaster ceiling of her bedroom. "But it was like discovering how to just _be_. There weren't any rules—it's just you and the music and the feel of it on your limbs, in the pull of your muscles."

Outside a lorry rumbles by, brakes squealing to a stop at the corner below them; the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the half-opened window illuminates a few dust motes floating downwards towards the hem of Josie's turquoise skirt. They sit quietly, sipping their tea, unsure of how precisely to move onwards from this resting point.

Mitchell snorts suddenly, the sound loud in the quiet of the room. "You sound exactly like this bloke I knew a few years ago."

"A vampire?" Josie asks, stumbling slightly over this new word; this young human girl trying to make sense of this new world before her simply because he took her hand and asked it of her.

"Always going on about how art was so Zen, how it was going to save the world." He turns to her, grins, "Gave it up quickly enough when the critics ripped his first show apart and went straight back to the undertakers."

Josie laughs, curling herself around her empty cup, as if trying to hold on to every second of this moment, this amusement, and Mitchell watches her with hooded eyes, recalling the way the bloke had grinned with shark-toothed joy when he showed Mitchell the drained corpse of that critic on the mortuary table.

Later, perhaps, he will tell her the truth, when he is stronger and she not so new to all of this; but for now he wants to feel this lie, this curl of hope growing between them in a rumpled bed on a Tuesday morning.

-----

On good days he tries to cook meals and fails miserably, winds up scraping charred lumps of food into the wastebin by the pantry door before heading out for the closest takeaway. Josie returns from her second job as a poorly paid waitress, complaining about particularly annoying customers until he cuts her off with a flourish and pulls her chair from the table for her. She praises his skill—-"Honestly, it's an art, the way you manage to order such good food"--and he thinks perhaps it can be as easy as this.

On bad days she locks him in her bathroom and sings off-key renditions of Velvet Underground songs to drown out his cursing while he rips his wrist open and gags at the taste of his own blood, copper and warmth and almost not quite right life on his tongue. He imagines her sitting on the edge of the tub, dress hiked up to display the milky white expanse of her thighs, her bare feet splattered with his blood and hers while he presses his mouth to the constellation of freckles a few inches above her right knee, all desire and need and the feel of blood on his tongue.

They go onwards.

-----

Herrick watches him too closely, trying yet failing to understand this new relationship. "It's a passing phase. You're an adolescent, really, Mitchell. Of course you'd decide to chuck it all for something as foolish as love."

They're seated at a rickety table in a small teashop, Herrick's new police cap placed neatly beside his saucer of tea.

"One of the few things we have in common with humans," he sighs, pausing to take a bite of his last biscuit. "The urge to rebel."

Mitchell sighs, knowing he probably sounds like a petulant child and not particularly caring. Herrick smiles at him from across the table, all amused parental love and benevolence, brushes imaginary crumbs from his hands.

"When you do kill her, ring me and I'll help you take care of things."

And he stands and puts his cap back on, waves to the blushing girl behind the till, and disappears out the door before Mitchell can even argue.

-----

Her mum visits and gives Mitchell heavy looks when Josie isn't looking, glances that accuse him of dragging her little girl into this half-life of waiting round, of dreams built on Josie's dancing and Mitchell's inability to give her anything more than what he already has.

She asks him why he doesn't have a better job; _nasty work, labor is_, she sniffs, and Mitchell gives her a lazy smile that is all mischievous amusement, and says in his best blasé tone, "It's rather hard for the undead to get better work." Beside her mum Josie's eyes widen over the rim of her glass and she stiffens, while Mitchell continues, "And as a performance artist I'm fully committed to embodying my work, even if it means my career suffers."

Ten minutes after her mum leaves they're fighting, all angry voices and jerky movement, Josie storming on about secrecy while she bangs dishes in the sink. He ends up spending the night out after Josie tells him it's not a game and he finally snaps and tells her to not pretend to even understand.

When he finally returns she accepts him back with crossed arms and tells him they can't keep going on pretending.

He moves in three days later, Herrick be damned, and never sees Josie's mum again.

-----

Josie whimpers softly in her sleep sometimes, small noises that she presses into Mitchell's shoulder, his back, sounds that make something along his spine shiver with the need to protect her, wrap himself around her and keep all the dark edges of himself hidden away neatly.

Eventually he learns to make simple meals and discovers he's actually good at baking, a skill Josie takes advantage of with merciless skill. They lie on the floor of the lounge, cheap carpet making his skin itch, smoking cheap weed and listening to Josie's collection of records, waiting for the latest batch of biscuits to finish baking.

Every so often she'll catch him watching her with an intense expression, still and focused on her while she stands in front of the full length mirror in her favorite slip (the faint pink of her cheeks when she blushes), trying to decide on this minidress or that velvet skirt. At those times she's secretly glad she can't see his reflection behind her, though she never tells him this.

He buys her a pair of hideous earrings for Christmas and she uses all of her meager acting skills to pretend she loves them, and then inadvertently catches his eye and cracks. Afterwards, lying together in bed with her head pressed against the taut skin of his stomach she tells him, "It's the thought that counts anyway. …Actually no, next time just ask me before you buy something."

"You're a cruel woman," he replies, voice going fuzzy on the edge of sleep. She lifts her head up, sitting up to swing her leg up over his stomach and lean forward to look at him.

"Quite," she replies breezily, and presses her mouth to the corner of his. He hums and swats her away, and falls asleep quickly. She slides off of him, curling into his side and watches his still chest, still amazed by the way he forgets to breathe when he sleeps.

This is love, then.

-----

They celebrate the beginning of a new decade by getting spectacularly drunk at a party hosted by one of Josie's friends. Mitchell wakes the next morning lying on the floor of the friend's hallway, the sound of traffic outside loud and grating to his sore head. He sits up slowly, eyes watering, and then stills, noticing the faint scent of blood underlying the heavier miasma of alcohol and sex and patchouli.

Ignoring the way his stomach drops when he stands quickly he surveys the area, adrenaline and panic combining to make him jittery fast in his movements. In the living room he finds a bloke and his girl sound asleep on the couch, the girl missing one of her heels. He can hear their heartbeats and so he continues on, padding silently through the apartment towards the master bedroom.

Screaming distracts him, the high thin wail of a young girl; Josie, he thinks, and is sprinting back towards the bathroom on the other side of the apartment without even thinking. He careens around the hall doorway, uncaring that the couple in the lounge are stirring and asking questions in scared voices. He slides on bare feet into the doorjamb of the bathroom, feet slipping on sticky liquid, so that he has to grab Josie around the waist to keep from falling.

She flinches when he touches her, breath quick and shallow; he looks over her shoulder into the bathroom, where a girl with red hair is lying neatly in the tub, her green dress stained brown with drying blood. "Jesus," he whispers, voice ruffling the curl of hair by Josie's right ear. He lets go of her and slides around her, avoiding the pools of blood dotting the tile floor, and drops to his knees beside the tub.

The girl has a delicate neck and soft lips, dainty teeth bared in a final scream; she can't be much more than eighteen, he thinks, and feels sick at the thought. Josie edges into the bathroom after him, the back of her thighs pressing into the worn front of the sink cabinet while she watches him with wide eyes.

The girl's left sleeve is slightly ruched up, displaying a gray smudge of something on the pale skin of her wrist. He grabs her arm gently, rolling the sleeve upwards to display a scrawled message in smudged ink.

_She smelled of you._

Herrick's handwriting; even splattered with blood and scratched quickly, he recognizes the flourishing loops of the letters.

And then the couple from the lounge discovers them and Mitchell loses himself in the sounds of their panicked screaming.

-----

Afterwards, after the police release them with a sigh and a warning to choose the right sorts of people as friends, they return to the flat and sit outside on the front stoop. Mitchell offers Josie his last cigarette and she takes it without looking at him, staring across the street at a group of children playing in the garden of the house opposite, exhaling smoke in quick puffs.

"We could leave here," she says finally, stubbing the cigarette out on the concrete between them and then wrapping her fingers into the fabric of her lap.

"No," Mitchell exhales, turns to look at her. "Herrick is tired of my playing house."

She makes a noise that is part sob and part exclamation, a choked noise of pain so raw that Mitchell has to look at the whorl of her ear when he continues, "We could go to fucking West Lothian and they'd find us and kill you. Herrick isn't known for his mercy."

"I know," she whispers, and turns to look at him. Her lips quirk into the ghost of a smile and she leans forward so that their foreheads touch, her lips a hair's breadth from his. "One day, when you finally gather up the courage to end it and kill him, think about me."

She tastes of tears and cheap lipstick and cigarette smoke. Decades later, when he thinks about her this will be the first memory he recalls, the ghost of this moment lingering on his tongue.

-----

There are other girls; young, pretty things with soft skin and a certain tilt of the chin, a way with words that is almost the same, close enough that he can imagine they are who Josie would have been, who she could have become in a different time, a different circumstance.

It hurts all the same.


End file.
